The Thinking Body

The Thinking Body: A Contemporary Metalworks Exhibition will be on view October 17, 2008 through January 4, 2009 at the Museum of Craft+Design, 550 Sutter Street in San Francisco.

The Thinking Body is an exhibition of works produced over the last thirty years by contemporary American and European artists working in a variety of diverse media. The exhibition presents a new examination of the relationship of the body's perceptual relationship to jewelry, functional objects and constructed spaces, and will relate the work of practitioners in the field to that of contemporary artists exploring the conceptual range of forms and objects related to metalsmithing.

The exhibition reflects on the artists' interpretations of function, use, display, and adornment of both familiar and luxury objects while considering their relationship to the body, challenging our response and understanding about objects. The Thinking Body examines how socially constructed ideas about objects can shift and expand in response to re-placement, re-thinking, and re-structuring. The body is at the center of a synergy of consciousness and flesh, gesture and structure, cultural identity and social role.

Many of the artists in the exhibition are internationally renowned and include: Melanie Bilenker (United States), Lauren Fensterstock (United States), Myra Mimlitsch-Gray (United States), Joan Parcher (United States), Cornelia Parker (England), Gerd Rothman (Germany), Janine Antoni (United States), and Gijs Bakker (The Netherlands).

Myra Mimlitsch-Gray's Encased Teapot is described as an object that requires physical exploration of its orifices and activation of its function. Janine Antoni's Umbilical is a spoon whose "bowl" expands into a cast of the interior of her mouth, linking the decorative silver spoon to its physical, as well as social, economic, and metaphoric function. Melanie Bilenker's hair jewelry is a new interpretation of a historical jewelry format that utilized disembodied pieces of hair, and Gijs Bakker uses the strategy of employing the "truth" of photography to shift the scale, meaning, and value of familiar forms of adornment.

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